Center for Criminal Justice Technology
The nonprofit Center for Criminal Justice Technology partners with federal, state, and local criminal justice agencies to develop adaptable approaches for modernizing systems and practices that improve the efficiency, safety, and coordination of criminal justice activities.
The Problem
Increasing demands on the criminal justice community often outpace available resources. As a result, the criminal justice community is implementing a wide variety of strategies—including the use of technology to enhance effectiveness, productivity, and officer safety.
The criminal justice system in the United States is decentralized. This decentralization offers many benefits, but it also creates obstacles to achieving maximum efficiencies and economies of scale in analyzing, designing, developing, and procuring various technology products and services. Few criminal justice agencies have the resources to keep abreast of the advances in technology and to critically and objectively analyze and evaluate the variety of technology products and services available to assist them in their public safety activities. This decentralization also impedes the sharing of critical information among the agencies.
The Solution
Noblis, a nonprofit company chartered in the public interest, has extensive experience assisting individual federal, state, and local criminal justice agencies – as well as cooperative groups of agencies – interested in sharing information and improving their information technology capabilities. Noblis is known for its broad range of technology-based expertise and unquestionable objectivity.
Using funds received from the U.S. Congress through the Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice (NIJ), Noblis formed the Center for Criminal Justice Technology (CCJT) in June 2001 to work on projects of common interest to the criminal justice community.
CCJT’s mission is to provide high quality, unbiased, and objective technical assistance and support to federal, state, and local criminal justice agencies, to make informed decisions on the technology issues confronting the community, and to investigate the operational suitability of emerging technologies through advanced prototyping and focused testing.
Noblis operates the Center in collaboration with diverse criminal justice agency partners including those from the law enforcement, corrections, and judicial communities. Projects provide for hands-on participation by all of our partners.
The Center’s publications and products are designed to be reusable and are available, at no cost, to all qualified criminal justice entities. Each project is pursued with one or more federal, state, or local agency partners and has three elements in common:
- They have broad applicability to the community
- They involve innovative technological approaches to improving effectiveness
- Products are designed to be reusable and adaptable by other agencies throughout the country
As a consequence of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, several of our projects are focused on the need to expedite the identification of cross-jurisdiction criminal activity, through information sharing and effective information analyses.
CCJT also will work on a direct contract basis to leverage Noblis’ company-wide experience with individual federal, state, and local criminal justice agencies in fulfilling these agency’s unique needs. Noblis addresses these needs by applying its expertise in the areas of:
- Systems Engineering
- Information Security
- Information Sharing
- Biometrics
- Communications
- Knowledge Management
- Requirements Analysis
- System Acquisition Support
Noblis works with its clients to create cost-effective and sustainable solutions to complex technological challenges. We help ensure that our clients’ systems and programs meet stakeholder requirements, accommodate changes in technology, and operate with sufficient safety, privacy, and security.
